Day 31 -- Resting and mending the Airstream in Fairbanks

Friday 7/21/2006

Lilli is coming in tonight and we have a ton of work to do to the trailer before she gets here. The original plan was for us to clean things up during the day, pick Lilli up at the Airport around 2AM, and then head down to Denali National Park. So much for that plan. As soon as we started to explore things in more detail, the situation was a bit worse than we first thought. It wasn't just tons of dirt inside and outside. Here is a summary of what happened to the trailer on the trip back and forth to Deadhorse.

Bottom line is that the truck held up very well. Sort of what one might have expected. But the Airstream, alas, has not lived up to the days when Wally Byam would take his units on trips such as the one from Cape Town to Cairo. The road we took was nowhere close to what the roads must have been like on Wally's expeditions. Do we regret taking our trailer out on a trip like this? Not at all. We intend to fix each and every issue we've encountered, hopefully in ways that it'll not happen again, even if we go back over the Dalton Highway.

And now, on with some of the cleanup work. We worked like mad during the day.

The kids help out with a first pass cleaning of the outside

Lovely refrigerator (notice cracked eggs in top shelf plus coke and other goodies on the door)

Travel in style with your Airstream. Honey, the pizza is ready!

In the picture above you'll notice a shop vac that I had borrowed from the campground office. When Erik tried it out it was not working very well. All the dirt it sucked up was blown out again on the other side. So he got the clever idea of cleaning it out. Of course, the filter was clogged and the canister almost full. But wait, there is more. There was a woman's thong in there too. Erik cleaned it all out but put the thong back in again for the next person to discover. It just makes you wonder what it had been used for. My imagination was running wild.

I install real support for stove and kitchen counter. Notice all the dust that crept in everywhere

We put in real screws and real 54 cent brackets to hold things in place

Along the floor, since all the cabinets from the door opening to the master bedroom had moved, I got that re-aligned and used better screws (instead of general purpose screws), and got things attached. Hopefully, this will not move anymore. The only downside with all of this was that it was just no way we would be able to wrap things up and then coast out after midnight with Lilli. Around 1:30AM, I got to the Airport, with Karl, to wait for Lilli. But she never showed. It turns out her flight from Boston was delayed due to lightning and this had cascaded into her now being stuck overnight in Seattle. She had left a message on my phone, which I couldn't find. When Karl and I got back to the trailer, Isabella had done an incredible job to clean things up. It looked quite presentable (on the inside). The outside still looked like it needed a serious wash. Exhausted, we went to bed at 3AM.

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All Pictures (c) 2006 Hamnqvist, Background features some fresh eggs in the fridge.